The independent music sector has ramped up its campaign against Universal Music’s acquisition of Downtown Music, launching an initiative called ‘100 Voices’, which centres on a book and website containing statements from more than 100 label bosses, industry execs and trade body chiefs formally opposing the deal.
Among them Beggars Group Chairman Martin Mills, who states, “We are now operating in an industry increasingly shaped by global corporations, whose dominance over digital infrastructure affects everything from artist visibility to revenue. This ongoing consolidation amounts to a systematic weakening of the independent sector’s ability to compete on fair terms”.
Secretly Group co-Founder Darius Van Arman adds, “When near-monopolist Universal tries to acquire Downtown, one of the largest independent music ecosystems, and does so in the name of independence, it cheapens what the word means. Market consolidation at this scale is not only anti-competitive, it is a fundamental threat to true independence”.
The Block The Deal website went live today following a meeting yesterday between representatives of the indie music sector and the European Commissioner For Economy And Productivity, Valdis Dombrovskis.
The European Union’s competition regulator is currently investigating the various competition law concerns that have been raised about Universal - already the biggest music rights company in the world - buying Downtown and with it the FUGA, CD Baby, Songtrust and Curve businesses, which together provide services to millions of independent artists and labels.
The EU launched a more detailed ‘phase two’ investigation into the transaction in July. That investigation is currently paused pending the delivery of some key information in relation to the deal. A new deadline for the investigation will be set once that information has been provided.
The ‘100 Voices’ campaign - building on an open letter about the deal signed by more than 200 industry execs in July - seeks to counter one of the narratives being pushed by Universal Music and its proxies: that opposition to the Downtown deal is coming from a small number of very vocal labels and trade bodies, and much of the indie sector is more relaxed about the acquisition.
Universal itself has said very little in public about the Downtown deal, but its narrative has been pushed by former indie sector execs that are now in business with the major, via op-ed articles and memos in or leaked to certain industry trade publications.
That’s included Downtown CEO Pieter van Rijn; Kenny Gates, founder of [PIAS], another indie distributor bought by Universal; and JT Myers and Nat Pastor, bosses of the Virgin Music Group, the Universal division that is technically buying Downtown.
As well as trying to play down the level of dissent within the indie music community over the Downtown deal, the major’s proxies have also sought to dispute statements from indie sector trade groups regarding Universal’s dominant market share, while also insisting that indies have nothing to worry about if Universal has access to all the consumption, financial and royalty data held by the various Downtown businesses.
Is concern around data really just “fantasy or paranoia”?
Interestingly, just as the Block The Deal website went live earlier today, Music Business Worldwide published an article outlining opinions expressed by French music lawyer Michaël Majster, who insists that the data concerns expressed around the Downtown deal stem “more from fantasy or paranoia than from a concrete, realistic, and rational analysis”.
MBW is very keen to stress that Majster isn’t a Universal proxy, and the article even makes a point of clarifying that Majster has not represented the major or Downtown.
Notwithstanding that clear separation between Majster and Universal, his perspective - published alongside job ads from Universal and [PIAS] - and conveniently appearing on the same day that Block The Deal is announced, is curiously aligned with the Universal narrative, which has been regularly expounded via op-eds and other articles published by MBW.
Majster argues that the major already has access to a huge amount of data about its rivals’ music, via publicly available Spotify stats, and data companies like Luminate and Chartmetric. And when a label is directly negotiating a deal with an artist, he says, it can just ask for the more confidential data about their streams and royalties.
Which is true to an extent, but FUGA as a distributor, Songtrust as a rights administrator and Curve as a royalty management platform all have access to much more valuable data about their clients’ music and revenues. All of which Universal could use to inform its digital marketing strategies and catalogue acquisitions, while also identifying and informing possible future artist deals.
Majster also points out that all three majors already have sizable distribution and label services divisions and questions whether anyone has ever felt the “disruptive effects” of the majors utilising the data controlled by those businesses.
Of course, that ignores the fact that earlier this year Sony Music boss Rob Stringer spent a significant amount of time hooting to investors about exactly how the mountain of data his company controls, including via its label services businesses The Orchard and AWAL, is key in helping the major to effectively compete in the rights acquisition space.
Stringer enthused about how Sony has “invested dramatically in analytics and technology” that “not only makes us smarter” but generates “valuable information” for Sony and its partners, giving it an “inside track on earnings” for deal negotiations.
More fundamentally, though, Majster’s ‘anyone can see streaming data’ assertion is rooted in an industry view formed at the cusp of the streaming era - not entirely surprising for someone for whom a career highlight was working closely with Deezer in its early years.
And more pertinently, his defence of Universal rests on some fundamental contradictions: if the data and infrastructure Universal would acquire by buying Downtown are as worthless as he claims, why is the major paying $775 million for them?
The price tag only makes sense if Universal is buying something it cannot replicate: market position, competitive intelligence, and control over infrastructure and data. This isn’t a minor inconsistency in Majster’s argument: it’s a thread that, when you pull it, unravels his entire thesis - and highlights yet again why this deal poses such an existential threat to the indie music sector.
The value of data in the AI era
Majster’s core assertion is that concerns over data access are meaningless because all that data is “easily publicly available” through chart data and services like Chartmetric or Luminate.
That claim is either dangerously naive or deliberately misleading, and completely misses the AI dimension, in which data holds huge power, meaning Downtown’s data may be the most valuable aspect of the acquisition, especially given this week’s reports that Universal and Warner are close to signing deals with a number of AI platforms.
Because these days, access to data is about a lot more than streaming numbers. The difference between publicly available data and the intelligence Downtown sits on is like predicting the weather in New York by putting your head out of the window in London, versus owning a satellite network trained on the Atlantic Ocean. One tells you it is raining in London just now; the other shows a hurricane building off the coast of the USA.
And as the majors inch closer to licensing deals with generative AI platforms that have the potential to define and dictate the parameters of the next phase of technological disruption in the music industry, control over catalogue and distribution infrastructure becomes even more critical.
Those who own or control both the content and the pipes won’t just determine what music reaches audiences through traditional streaming platforms - they will decide whose catalogue trains tomorrow’s AI models, how attribution gets calculated, which artists receive compensation, and ultimately who gets to participate in the AI-generated revenue streams that could dwarf today’s streaming income.
In AI training, data access is critical to model development. Earlier this year Elon Musk said that AI companies had effectively ‘run out of data’ to train their models - a challenge that is being seen across the sector.
Models trained on larger, more diverse datasets perform better, and crucially, as content for training music genAI models is being locked behind licensing deals, a continuous flow of fresh content from independent artists could provide the training edge that AI models need to stay current and on-trend.
The quality, diversity and recency of training data directly determines an AI’s capabilities. Indies are where new genres emerge, where cultural movements begin, and where tomorrow’s sounds are born.
This creates a new form of market power: whoever controls access to training data shapes what AI can create, and control over training data becomes control over music’s future economics - just as, in the streaming era, market share and access to catalogue has been a critical driver of the economics of streaming.
The companies that can offer AI developers the most comprehensive, diverse and current catalogues will dictate licensing terms, attribution models and revenue flows.
While Universal already has a substantial pipeline of indie content through the Virgin Music Group and the companies it gobbled up, Ingrooves and mtheory, the Downtown acquisition would massively expand this reach. And with it give Universal even more power and influence in AI training and monetisation conversations - which are sure in the first instance to be short term agreements renegotiated and revised on an ongoing basis as technology evolves.
More importantly though, these early deals are not ‘just’ licensing agreements - they’re likely to be the foundational deals that will establish the future shape of music and AI - how AI companies access music, how creators get compensated, and who profits from the coming wave of AI-generated content.
The Downtown acquisition could transform Universal’s bargaining power, offering AI companies not just its mainstream and heritage catalogues, but comprehensive access to the cutting edge of indie creators - the exact content that AI platforms need to stop outputs sounding dated and derivative.
Indeed, the expanded catalogue and infrastructure brought under Universal’s roof will allow it to accelerate its own development of proprietary AI powered tools and services - trend prediction algorithms, automated A&R systems, generative music creation tools.
Tools and services that it could use internally for competitive advantage, or selectively offer to clients, creating new dependencies and revenue streams, while positioning itself as the essential intermediary between independent artists and trustworthy AI technology.
How data will inform the future of the music business
So data access isn’t just about that old-school idea that “being able to see streaming numbers” when negotiating new artist deals is what matters.
It’s about using data to power the tools, services and insights that will inform the future of the entire music business. That includes AI, but also encompasses a new generation of internal tools and services powered by algorithms that rely on huge quantities of data to gain a competitive edge.
Because if you want to develop proprietary algorithms - which are fundamentally mathematical models driven by pattern recognition - those algorithms are improved when you give them more data.
Consider an AI-powered A&R tool, to predict which artists will break through. The system needs to learn from huge numbers of examples of tracks, and the data signals around those tracks - not just the hits, but the near-misses, the slow burns, the regional break-outs that never actually went mainstream on the global stage.
Universal already knows what happens after artists succeed: adding comprehensive visibility into the earlier stages where future stars are still emerging from the independent ecosystems is hugely valuable data. Raw streaming numbers are just the beginning.
Predictive algorithms require other derivative metrics and time-series features like velocity, acceleration, momentum patterns, inflection points where trajectories change. The algorithm needs to identify leading indicators - behavioural signals that precede commercial outcomes by days, weeks or months.
These early warning signals best emerge through pattern recognition across massive datasets, where the algorithm learns which combinations of engagement metrics, network effects and consumption patterns reliably predict future performance.
Most importantly, these early warning signals emerge best through pattern recognition across the entire market, not just major label catalogues. The additional data that would be brought to Universal via Downtown might not be hugely significant in terms of a ‘whole market view’, but when it comes to getting a competitive edge in the AI-era about to kick off in music, it could be hugely significant.
Feature engineering - the process by which raw data is turned into variables to create more effective inputs for machine learning - requires massive datasets to be meaningful. You need enough examples to distinguish signals from noise, to identify which metric combinations have genuine predictive power versus which are just correlation.
With Downtown’s 30 billion monthly streams - on top of Universal’s already huge catalogue and front line streaming numbers - Universal would have a combination of breadth and depth of data to build models with the temporal resolution and statistical significance to identify leading indicators - those early warning signs - before smaller competitors even see movement in ‘lagging indicators’ like chart position.
That could provide them a meaningful competitive insight when it comes to data engineering, enabling models with unprecedented predictive power - tools that independents could never replicate without similar access to real-time market-wide data flows.
Even worse, indie labels and artists effectively become training data for AI deals and systems that they would neither control, nor adequately profit from.
The stakes could not be higher
Majester’s dismissal of these concerns as “fantasy or paranoia” doesn’t engage with the substantive competition issues presented by the deal.
And it reveals either a fundamental misunderstanding of modern music market dynamics, or a deliberate attempt to minimise legitimate concerns at a fundamental inflection point in the industry, as AI disrupts music on a scale even greater than the disruption of downloads or streaming.
The European Commissions’ decision on this deal won’t just determine whether Universal can add to its market share. It will determine whether independent music maintains any genuine ability to compete in an increasingly concentrated, data-driven, AI-powered industry. The stakes could not be higher.
Which is why - as the ‘100 Voices’ campaign illustrates - it’s not just a few opinionated label bosses and trade body chiefs who have serious concerns about the Downtown deal, those concerns are shared by entrepreneurs and business leaders across the entire independent sector.
